HOLD OF GOLD

By WILLIAM OSCAR JOHNSON

In the beginning, super-heavyweight wrestler Bruce Baumgartner was a certifiable mediocrity. He never finished better than third in the New Jersey state high school wrestling competition, and such U.S. college wrestling meccas as Oklahoma State and Iowa didn't give him a look. He went to Indiana State University and grappled in relative obscurity until his senior year, when he exploded in a burst of 44 straight wins and ended up with the National Collegiate Athletic Association title. That was 1982, and he hasn't lost to an American since, having won 14 consecutive national championships along the way.

Now, a relative ancient at 35, he is about to go for a record no wrestler of any nationality has ever achieved--medals in four different Olympic Games. Baumgartner took gold in '84 and '92 and silver in '88, and for the record he also won medals at no fewer than nine world championships over the years, including golds in '86, '93 and just last August, which makes him the No. 1 serious super-heavyweight wrestler on the planet at the moment. (Pumped-up comics from WrestleMania need not apply.)

Can he do it again? Aged though they are, all his systems seem to be go: "I'm stronger than ever. I'm training smarter than ever. I know when to rest and when to fight. My shoulder's not the greatest, and my knees are pretty bad, but mentally I'm the best I've been." A torn rotator cuff in his left shoulder required surgery a year ago, and the knees are simply wearing down after decades of responding to commands for violent activity from a 286-lb., 6-ft. 2-in. titan. However, it was only last April, in a critical U.S.-Russian team face-off in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, that Baumgartner's imperfect joints functioned perfectly as he handily pinned the one opponent who has been his constant nemesis in recent years--Andrei Shumilin of Russia, who had taken him in three straight matches in recent years. (Shumilin skipped the '95 championships, which Bruce won.)

"I felt real good about what I'm doing after that match," says Baumgartner. "But being an old wrestler is a little like being an old car: the more you drive it, the more goes wrong with it." The junkyard may inevitably await, but in the meantime Baumgartner is driving himself these days as if he were a spanking-new Mercedes just out of the showroom--but no, the automotive analogy doesn't work. There is nothing even remotely slick or streamlined about Bruce Baumgartner's life. He and his wife Linda live with their two young sons in bucolic Pennsylvania in a gray farmhouse on 16 acres that lie between Punxsutawney--well known as the center of the universe on Groundhog Day--and Edinboro, a three-stoplight town whose major industry is Edinboro University (enrollment: 7,000), where Baumgartner has coached wrestling for the past 12 years.

He met Linda at Indiana State in 1980, when he had a bad ankle and she was a student trainer. "It was love at first taping," she recalls. On their first date, he ate ice cream while she, dieting, had oatmeal. They shook hands good night. Two years later, they were married, and they have toasted the anniversary of that first date ever since with ice cream and oatmeal.

Baumgartner is in many ways the ultimate practitioner of the simple life. He gardens, specializing in asparagus and potatoes, bakes his own batches of Christmas cookies, builds furniture and toys, collects everything from stamps and model trains to Russian dolls and Olympic pins, shares the cooking and cleaning chores with Linda, and boasts of endless, painstaking repair and paint jobs that keep the 75-year-old farmhouse in impeccable condition. He has even been known to watch a little pro wrestling on TV in his spare time, exulting when former opponent and ex-University of Oklahoma wrestler Steve Williams, also known as Dr. Death, appears: "I killed Dr. Death!"

Despite the violence and brute power involved in his sport, Baumgartner presents a remarkably placid, almost shy front to the world away from the wrestling mat. "He's always homesick," confides Linda. "He misses his bed and of course his refrigerator." Whenever she picks him up at the airport, she brings along a plate of chocolate-chip cookies for him.

One of the NCAA's top scholar-athletes, Baumgartner had a 3.77 grade-point average at Indiana State, and has talked about going for a Ph.D. in industrial arts so that he can teach in college. He has found great satisfaction in teaching and motivating kids on his surprisingly good Edinboro team--which last year ranked an impressive 11th in the NCAA. "Winning is a great feeling for me," Baumgartner said last year, "but what is more important as a coach is when you take a kid with marginal grades and you help him make good grades and get a good degree. You help make him respectable. That's the biggest enjoyment I get from coaching--helping a kid become a successful person in life."

Baumgartner has to count his riches in nonmaterial things, for he is certainly not accumulating any kind of wealth from wrestling. If he had to live solely on his income from the sport (mostly from a U.S.A. Wrestling stipend and speaking fees), he says, "it would be very hard to have a family and an adult life-style." His coaching salary boosts that income considerably, but he is still well below six figures. As he once said, "We don't need much. Besides, it could be worse: I could have been an archer."

It must be remembered, however, that almost all American wrestlers, Baumgartner included, were blessed in recent years with one almost bottomless source of material support, a boon that precious few other minor-sport athletes have enjoyed. For the wrestlers, it was the magnificent training facility and generous financing donated by the demented Pennsylvania millionaire John du Pont, now awaiting trial for the January 1996 murder of Dave Schultz, an inspirational mainstay of the American team. Baumgartner, along with everyone else in U.S. wrestling, is struggling to recover from the trauma of it all. "There is no way to measure how great Dave's loss is. He gave us leadership you can't replace," says Baumgartner. "There is also no way to measure the loss of John du Pont. Without him, we would not have a national team. We'd never have beaten the Russians. We had our world training camp there for the past six years. Basically, Mr. Du Pont started it all. Anyone who went to the Olympics out of the background he provided had a lead on the rest of the world."

If Baumgartner wins a medal of some kind in Atlanta, he will join a small and decidedly mixed bag of Americans (no archers) who have won medals in four Olympics: Francis Conn Findlay (rowing, yachting), J. Michael Plumb (equestrian), Norbert Schemansky (weight lifting) and Al Oerter (discus). Each of these men is amazing enough in longevity, but they compete physically in solo events while the aging Baumgartner has to pit himself in hand-to-hand combat against powerful grapplers younger and fresher than he.

Besides iffy joints and aging muscles, Baumgartner is disadvantaged because his techniques and tactics are an open book to his opponents; he has been thoroughly scouted and diagrammed over his long years in international competition. "I try to change my offense a little bit," he says, "but it has been around for a while. That makes it more predictable. Also you don't have the youthful endurance and craziness you had when you were young. But you do wrestle a lot smarter and a little more conservatively. I think that creates many more successes."

A major reason for Baumgartner's unprecedented longevity at the top of his sport is sheer bulk. Competing as a no-limit super heavyweight, he doesn't have to submit himself to the excruciating and exhausting regimen of making weight that men in the lighter classes must do. "I have a huge edge," he says. "A guy competing at 114 lbs. goes home, has a skimpy, no-cal meal and spends his life fighting off ounces. It's physically debilitating and emotionally killing. For me, I go home, eat a steak and relax, and the pounds take care of themselves."

How long can he keep doing this? "I am at an age where people are starting to doubt my abilities again, even though I did pretty well at the Worlds in '95 and in this year's competitions. I'm focused on Atlanta. I don't look beyond. If I'm lucky and I win, I could foresee myself just walking away from it all. Or I could foresee myself staying in it for Sydney. Let's just say I want to compete until it's no longer fun. Or until my body gives up. Or until my wife gets sick and tired of it. Whichever comes first."